Rating underdogs Ding Liren and Praggnanandhaa moved on to the finals of the Chessable Masters after knocking out Magnus Carlsen and Anish Giri respectively. After drawing their first three encounters, Ding defeated Carlsen in game 4 to clinch match victory. Meanwhile, Pragg and Giri traded blows to take their match to tiebreaks. The 16-year-old Indian prodigy was stronger in blitz, and thus knocked out his famed opponent.
China’s Ding is the new favourite for next month’s Candidates after Alireza Firouzja, 18, failed in Bucharest, and the 29-year-old will play the world No 1 at least once during the Chessable Masters
Every chess player has a unique style of preparing some like to study classics, some follow the latest updates, others rely heavily on engines. However, there is one common thread between most of the top elite-level players: they have all studied the classics. Thus, GM Sundararajan Kidambi decided to decode Jose Raul Capablanca’s brilliance and showcased it with a few examples. He posed an important question: if the best of the best learned and got inspired by the studying the classics, why can’t we do the same?
"Winter is Coming" is the title of a book by Garry Kasparov published in 2015. In it he warned that Russia’s descent from a nascent democracy into a full-blown dictatorship under Vladimir Putin made it a threat to the West and world peace. "Garry could be forgiven for declaring: I bloody told you so," writes Malcolm Pein in the April 2022 edition of CHESS Magazine. In it he describes the consequences the Russian invasion of Ukraine has for the world of chess.